Vermont Studio Center

Sydney Lea is author of thirteen volumes of poetry, most recently Here (Four Way Books, 2019). A former Vermont Poet Laureate and a Pulitzer finalist, he has also published a novel, a collection of literary criticism, and four volumes of personal essays. His collaborative work with former Delaware Laureate Fleda Brown, Growing Old in Poetry: Two Poets, Two Lives, is now available, and his newer literary essays, The Music of What Happens: Lyric and Everyday Life, will be out in 2020, as will his book-length mock-epic poem, The Exquisite Triumph of Wormboy, a collaboration with former Vermont Cartoonist Laureate James Kochalka.

Emily Bernard is the author of Black is the Body: Stories from My Mother's Time and Mine, which was named one of the best books of 2019 by Kirkus Reviews and National Public Radio. Her previous works include: Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her essays have been reprinted in Best American Essays, Best African American Essays, and Best of Creative Nonfiction. She has received fellowships from the Alphonse A. Fletcher Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the MacDowell Colony, the Vermont Arts Council, and the W. E. B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University. Emily is the Julian Lindsay Green and Gold Professor of English at the University of Vermont. She lives in Burlington, Vermont with her husband and twin daughters.

Jennifer Elise Foerster earned her PhD in English and Literary Arts from the University of Denver and her MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University. Jennifer teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA Low-Residency Program, and co-directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma. A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Jennifer is the author of Leaving Tulsa (2013) and Bright Raft in the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press. She lives in San Francisco.

Bushra Rehman is a poet, novelist and cultural activist. Her novel Corona, a dark comedy about being Muslim American, was noted by Poets & Writers among the Best Debut Fiction of 2013. Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism. She has served as a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative, Urban Word NYC, and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her poetry collection Marianna’s Beauty Salon was released in 2018 and her first YA novel Corona: Stories of a Queens Girlhood is forthcoming from Tor/Macmillan in 2020.

Heid E. Erdrich is author and editor of eight books, including the poetry collection Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media. Heid edited New Poets of Native Nations from Graywolf Press and co-edited Sister Nations, an anthology of Native American women’s writings. Her non-fiction memoir-in-recipes, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories and Recipes was a 2014 City Pages Top Food Book. Heid's awards include two Minnesota Book Awards, the 2018 Native Arts and Cultures Fund National Fellowship, three Minnesota State Arts Board grants, and the Loft-McKnight Fellowship in prose. She works as an educator, interdisciplinary artist, and independent visual arts curator. Heid has collaborated with visual artists on award-winning poem videos and animations created with an all-indigenous crew. Her most recent book incorporates her poem videos via QR codes. Heid teaches in the Augsburg College Low-residency MFA program. Heid E. Erdrich is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain.

Sue Halpern is a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College and a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. Halpern is the author of seven books, most recently, Summer Hours at the Robbers Library. Her book Four Wings and a Prayer: Caught in the Mystery of the Monarch Butterfly was made into an Emmy-nominated film. Halpern has written on science, technology and social issues for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and many other publications in addition to The NYRB. She is the director of the Middlebury Fellowship in Narrative Journalism and the former editor of NYRBLit, an electronic publishing imprint of New York Review Books. Halpern received a BA from Yale University and a doctorate from Oxford, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.

Christian Bök is the author of Eunoia (Coach House Books, 2001)—a bestselling work of experimental literature, which has gone on to win the Griffin Poetry Prize. Bök is one of the earliest founders of Conceptualism (the poetic school of avant-garde writing made famous, in part, by the activities of Kenneth Goldsmith). Bök has created artificial languages for two television shows: Gene Roddenberry’s Earth: Final Conflict and Peter Benchley’s Amazon. Bök has earned many accolades for his virtuoso recitals of “sound-poems” (particularly Die Ursonate by Kurt Schwitters)—and he has performed lectures and readings at more than 200 venues around the world in the last four years. Bök is on the verge of finishing his current project, entitled The Xenotext—a work that requires him to engineer the genome of an unkillable bacterium so that the DNA of such an organism might become not only a durable archive that stores a poem for eternity, but also an operant machine that writes a poem in response. Bök is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and he currently teaches Creative Writing and Literary Studies in the School of Creative Arts and Humanities at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia.

SARAH AUDSLEY has received support for her work from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center and the Banff Centre’s Writing Studio. Recent work can be found in Four Way Review, The Massachusetts Review, Memorious, Scoundrel Time, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. She is a graduate of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and serves as the Staff Artist, Writing Program Coordinator at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT.

Robert Lopez is the author of three novels, Part of the World, Kamby Bolongo Mean River--named one of 25 important books of the decade by HTML Giant--and All Back Full; and two story collections, Asunder and Good People. He teaches at The New School, Pratt Institute, Columbia University, and the Solstice Low-Res MFA Program at Pine Manor College. Visit him at www.robertlopez.net.

Akiko Busch is the author of Geography of Home, The Uncommon Life of Common Objects, Nine Ways to Cross a River, and The Incidental Steward. She was a contributing editor at Metropolis magazine for twenty years, and her essays about design, culture, and nature have appeared in numerous national magazines, newspapers, and exhibition catalogues. She has taught at the University of Hartford and Bennington College and is currently on the faculty of the Design Research program at the School of Visual Arts. Her work has been recognized by grants from the Furthermore Foundation, NYFA, and Civitella Ranieri. Her collection of essays, How to Disappear, will be published by Penguin Press in spring 2019. She lives in the Hudson Valley.